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Moon River and Me

By Paul B. Brown April 9, 2007 9:18 amApril 9, 2007 9:18 am

Scenes from Alison and Paul’s Savannah sojurn. (Photos: Alison Davis)

The fact that we were going to take a long weekend in Savannah, before we sat down with another architect, shows just how much my attitude about building our dream home had changed in just a matter of months.

When we started out, my feeling was that we needed to begin construction immediately. I couldn’t stand the thought of spending another winter living in New England. There was no time to lose and certainly no time for long weekends.

But if you hit me over the head enough times, eventually I get the message. At every step in the process — from finding the right place to build, to being forced to let our land settle, to our current search for the perfect architect — everything had taken substantially longer than I had anticipated.

I could either keep hoping the process would speed up — and as my wife constantly reminds me, doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result is one of the classic definitions of insanity — or I could accept things.

As one of my favorite philosophers put it, I needed to “have faith, or pandemonium’s liable to walk upon the scene.”

At parties, one of the things that Alison and I do that annoys our friends to no end is that we force them to rank their favorite lyricists. I have John Herndon Mercer, that aforementioned favorite philosopher (Nov. 18, 1909 – June 25, 1976) at No. 3 — behind Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart, but ahead of Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin. (Feel free to submit your own list.)

And there are two great constants in Johnny Mercer’s lyrics: perspective and time. Things can be positive (“I’m gonna love you, like nobody’s loved you, come rain or come shine”) or negative (“We’re drinking my friend, to the end, of a brief episode”) but you clearly see where they fit into the bigger picture.

Walking around the hometown of the Bard of Savannah, as they refer to him at Georgia State University, where they have a special Johnny Mercer collection, I understood where he got that perspective. Everything from the antebellum Gothic-style homes, to the restored cotton warehouses along the riverfront, to the historic district, which dates back to 1733, lets you know how little control you have over time. You are just passing through. The city will be here long after you are gone.

That helped underscore for me that the construction of our dream home was going to happen at its own darn pace, and that there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. We would reach — to use a famous Mercer phrase from “Moon River” — our “rainbow’s end” eventually, so there was no rush to meet with our potential architect. (See how mature I have become.)

Recognizing that events chronicled here are not “real time” and understanding that someone decided this blog may be more readable and interesting as a result-please offer us some indication of where your home-creating process really stands. I’m sure philosophical evolutions are part of it all, but I’d like to know more about that road. You’ve met and hired 1 builder, you’ve met and been rejected by 1 architect. If you are in fact “doing things over and over again” what are/were those things? This page sems to be less blog and more serial providing a space for two talented authors to give a severely edited account of a complex intensely rewarding experience without delivering any practical information.

I have to say I agree with the above 2 comments. A blog of this sort… follow along as we build a house from scratch… makes no sense unless the active audience can participate in the process with comments. It is as if the audience is wasting their time with commenting. The whole purpose of a blog is to be in real time, otherwise your story is better suited in the regular times real estate section as one complete piece. I love the idea of your blog as I blog about the same experience close to your project in FL. This may be why I long for up to date information personally. The problem solving and unique decisions that need to made down here on a project like this are very different from elsewhere in the country. Your process is very important to me specifically but I want to be able to get on board with it to really see what’s going on with the project. For instance, it doesn’t make sense to me to hire an out of state architect but if you’ve already done so then what’s the point of the discussion via comments.

Seriously, I’ve been following almost from the beginning, and this last post is the last straw. Miscellaneous ruminations, weekend travel notes, plaintive observations about time passing… is the New York Times paying for this indefinitely? Also, if this were ‘real time’, there is no way I’m waiting years for this thing to finally happen.

I’d like to thank the guy
Who wrote the song
That made my baby
Fall in love with me

Who put the bomp
In the bomp bah bomp bah bomp?
Who put the ram
In the rama lama ding dong?
Who put the bop
In the bop shoo bop shoo bop?
Who put the dip
In the dip da dip da dip?
Who was that man?
I’d like to shake his hand
He made my baby
Fall in love with me (yeah!!)

Comment number 3 – Mrs. Gottfried, you wrote, “The problem solving and unique decisions that need to made down here on a project like this are very different from elsewhere in the country.”, and, “For instance, it doesn’t make sense to me to hire an out of state architect…”

I wonder if you would kindly expand on those two points. Your insight would be helpful and informative. Thanks.

Well I have looked at this a couple times. My wife and I moved into our new beach house in Shell Beach in July. We had started almost four years before to remodel our old place.
Our architect, who finally coughed up the design we wanted, said he was a builder too. Turned out he used funds from one project on others so we axed him. Finally hired a construction management professor at a nearby college to oversee things. He supplied a wonderful builder. Note the builder came second not first to the architect.
Who knew a spring would pop up under the old house. Requiring a demolition. City said you still have to build the new place to the old plan or start over. It was now two and half years into the project.
Spent about double the 300K we first thought.
The white cedar shingles and wainscoting and hardwood floors and granite in the new kitchen and huge deck facing the ocean and just to be there smelling the air (although August the pelicans come to breed and there are millions of them) and sitting on the deck seeing whales in the Bay …. well it was worth it after all.

Because of the sub-tropical climate there are many special considerations as to building materials, building design, building orientation that make for a more cohesive end product. Certainly some of these are prudent when building anywhere but because of the intense heat etc building a sustainable design with proper window orientation and air flow throughout can really impact utility costs during high AC season. Of course, hurricanes tear through as well so that in and of itself has much need for consideration. Above all, at least from what I am finding, couty building codes here are very strict in general and more so with FEMA rules of elevation.

About the architect choice, I don’t know if it makes a difference but if something comes up I know I have architects that in any worst case could visit my site. Also, the 2 builders we are deciding between are local and know the architect. I am able to go to the places they’ve designed vs. looking at photos. This process is new to us as well but it does seem more comforting to going to the architect or having them come to the site for inspiration during the designing phase. Will this architect need to visit the site to do this design? I don’t have an answer but it would seem to be more about a certain look than function within an a certain unique environment. It’s just 2 different ways to look at building a home.

We had initially looked into Michelle Kaufman prefab, sustainable designs which would have been perfect for us. She only does work on the west coast, however, and our house had to elevated 8 feet in the air. If we went for prefab with the cost savings there, we’d try to navigate the orientation etc ourselves I guess. But if you are designing from scratch it just seems like there should be more in the package and the project as a whole than how many bathrooms and how big the master needs to be within a certain sq footage.
We are already in over our heads but we’re going to go for it because we really fell in love how our architects managed to design the home including all that’s around us. Anyway, I am not an expert this is just some of things we are finding as we go along with our build. It’s different for everyone.

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They've found an idyllic tiny town in Florida, they've bought a piece of land and now Paul B. Brown and Alison Davis are setting out to build their dream house. How hard can it be, they wonder, even though they live 1,500 miles away, they've never built a home before and they don't know anything about architects, builders, local zoning laws or financing? On this blog for Great Homes, they recount their successes and failures and will chronicle their adventures to come.